Two New Spam Laws in Japan

An anonymous reader submits: "The Daily Yomiuri, one of the major newpapers in Japan, reports (in English) that two new laws aimed at spam have just come into effect. In short, the laws require that spammers honor 'opt-out,' provide a valid return address, indicate the commercial nature of the message in the title, and never use randomly generated email addresses. The laws were pressured into effect by NTT DoCoMo, who complained that as much as 84% of all email circulating on its system (i.e., cell phones) is sent at random."

Comments

Concerning

[Bouncings]

I'm starting to get concerned about the growing number of laws regulating spam. A lot of spam I get says "This email cannot be considered spam because it is in compliance with XYZ"

So my question is, are these moderate anti-spam laws really helping or hurting? I see them, in the long run, offering some legitimacy to spam. In that these laws are so weak, that they don't really curb spam, but because they are the only regulation on the topic, spammers will point their ISPs to these laws and demand service.

I'd say maybe the community should fight all laws but out-right bans on spam.

Re:Concerning

[DeadMeat (TM)]

The trick is, they're not in compliance with anything. Spam usually refers to Senate bill S.1618 or House bill HR 3133, neither of which was passed into law. They would have both required working opt-out addresses and legitimate headers, so virtually all spam wouldn't have been in compliance with it anyway.

Incidentally, setting your mail filters to delete all mail with "S.1618" in the body is a terrific spam filter, since no legitimate mail ever refers to it, and nearly all spam does.

Don't get so excited yet

[twilight30]

As someone who is part Japanese and spent two years over there, I'd suggest not getting too excited about this.

As the article points out the government is setting up consultation centres to handle complaints. Redress from the courts, however, is nothing like what we see in Western cultures, let alone British, Australian, New Zealand, American or Canadian courts. In Japan, court cases are long, excessively-drawn-out affairs that do not generally reduce to simple answers. In fact, I'd hypothesise that many outside legal advisers would view the Japanese system as hopelessly hidebound.

I think that the social pressures extant in Japanese society probably could develop into more effective constraints -- about the only aspects of the law that I think would be useful are the 'naming-and-shaming' ones, as bad publicity will lead to a direct and measurable loss of business.

The thing is, DoCoMo might have had better luck in controlling this earlier by :

• funding an ad campaign to its business customers on the 'evils' of cellphone/Net spam
• taking aggressive, direct action to cut off abusers
• consulting with other phone suppliers and retailers that deal with the business community
• developing informal standards directly identifying spam ('ADV' or the equivalent) earlier
• harping on and on and on -- media interviews separate from the ad campaign above

If the phone companies are resorting to calling for help, they must have really lost control of the situation, as they generally don't like to take this route.